The late William F. Buckley famously observed that he would take being ruled by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book over the faculties at Harvard and MIT. Full of book smart people with nosebleed IQs, the simple truth is that professors are the people who can’t.

The above is particularly true when it comes to something as basic as economics. Economics is ultimately about growth, and growth is as simple as removing the tax, trade, regulatory, and monetary barriers to production. Put more simply, tax and regulate as a little as possible (taxes penalize work, regulations simply don’t work), allow individuals to trade and invest their surplus with others irrespective of country, and provide them with a stable currency to measure and maximize the former. If you do that, you have stupendous growth. No numbers are needed.

All of which brings us to one of the most comical lines ever written on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Though the newspaper is an increasingly lively source of information on all manner of subjects from business, to sports, to arts & entertainment, the front page has remained somewhat sober in its reportage. Sure enough, what was comical to this reader was presumably not meant to be funny despite it surely eliciting laughter from a high number of the Journal’s sentient readers.

Specifically, last Saturday’s edition, in an article about Harvard professor Lawrence Summers, noted that the Fed Chairman hopeful “has seen his views on the global economy, policy, and markets come into strong demand” since returning to the private sector (from the Obama administration) in 2011. When the laughing subsided after reading the latter I was reminded of the always wrong economists at Goldman Sachs in the ‘90s. Clients of Wall Street’s foremost investment bank were known to keenly follow their research in order to profit from betting against it.

One might at first assume something similar is at work with Summers. That’s the case because at least his modern economic analysis is rather devoid of insight.

Readers could doubtless point to so many examples supporting the above contention, but in the interest of time and space, it’s best to touch on a few examples from the last several years. In January of 2008 Summers wrote in the Financial Times that renewed economic growth was as simple as “a $50bn-$75bn package implemented over two to three quarters [that] would provide about 1 per cent of gross domestic product in stimulus over the period of its implementation.” More specifically, Summers was calling for Washington to distribute rebate checks to the citizenry in order to allegedly stimulate demand.

What’s comical is that a simple analysis of the professor’s musings reveals that rebates would logically restrain growth. That’s the case because economic growth is about production of something desired by the marketplace, yet Summers was calling for no such thing. Instead, he was seeking a redistribution of wealth from one set of hands to another. There’s no new production to speak of and surely no new demand, just a shift of demand by government force.

Importantly, the story gets worse. Empirical evidence is pretty clear that the rich account for the majority of federal tax revenues, so any rebates paid are going to logically result from society’s most productive being fleeced so that its least productive receive checks. The incentives of Summers’ plea for growth were more than backwards; raise the cost of work for the wealth creators while cushioning indolence among those who are least economically productive.

Keynesians reading this are doubtless seething, screaming that the poor and middle class are more likely to spend rebate checks, thus the purpose of forced wealth redistribution, but even the latter doesn’t stand up to the most youthful of scrutiny. To put it plainly, no act of saving subtracts from demand. Banks don’t accept deposits (liabilities) so that they can sit on the money; instead they offer interest on deposits so that they can take the funds deposited and turn them into loans (assets). Money saved never sits idle as much as it serves as capital for market-disciplined banks to lend out to entrepreneurs and those with immediate demands.

Thinking about the above, if we ignore how very much banks have become coddled supplicants of the political class, including Summers, they’re far more likely to lend out monies saved in an economically stimulative way than governments are. Wasn’t it Summers himself who once wisely uttered something along the lines of “government is a bad venture capitalist”?

Moving to Barack Obama’s presidency, despite persistently weak economic growth amid massive government spending ‘stimulus,’ Summers remained a cheerleader for same. This first revealed itself when he served Obama as director of the National Economic Council. Spending advocate Christina Romer confirmed this to Confidence Men author Ron Suskind. Romer recounted to Suskin that once Summers fully came on board with her failed notions about government spending ‘stimulus,’ “[Larry and I] really started to have a decent working relationship.”

Once back in the private sector, Summers’ support for government spending became, if anything, even more strident. As he put it in the Financial Times last fall:

“Barack Obama has recognised the inadequacy of demand as the main barrier to growth and sought to bolster both public and private sector demand since becoming president. Recent work by the International Monetary Fund has confirmed the premise of his policies, namely that at a time when short-term interest rates are at zero, fiscal policies are especially potent as multipliers are larger than normal. “